Tag: books

Denise Mina, “The Long Drop”, which I’ll give a B; it’s a fictional retelling of a true event (i.e., the events leading to the hanging death of Peter Manuel, a brutal serial killer in Glasgow in the 1950s). Quite absorbing and dark, and also GODDAMN those people can drink.

Mohsin Hamid, “Exit West”, which earns an A; a beautiful and melodic love story as seen through the eyes of refugees, and also there are magic doors.

Patty Yumi Cottrell, “Sorry To Disrupt the Peace”, which gets a B; I don’t know how to describe this book at all, except it’s a remarkable look at mental illness from the mind of someone who probably doesn’t realize that they are incredibly mentally ill.

And now I’m reading Daryl Gregory’s “Spoonbenders”, which is long enough that it’ll almost certainly end up being my first finished book of 2018, and which can probably best be described as a book version of The Royal Tenenbaums, but about a family of psychics.

2. Due to a sudden and unexpected influx of Amazon gift cards, I, um, bought a 55″ 4K HDR TV. It is not the best 4K HDR TV one can buy, and indeed the transaction happened so fast I didn’t even have time to properly make sure I was getting what I actually wanted (I probably should’ve waited to do some actual research), but it was (a) available and (b) cheap and (c) it showed up on Tuesday. So that happened. Now I just need a decent sound bar and my gaming room will be complete.

3. I still don’t know if I’m gonna do a Games of 2017 post. I’m looking over what I played this year and despite other people saying that this was the best year in games since 2007, there’s only a handful of games that I can say are worth a damn. Or maybe it’s just me. I played a lot this year but I don’t know that I enjoyed very much. I still can’t get into Breath of the Wild, which is probably heretical to admit, but there it is. If I had to round up a top 5, it’d probably look something like this:

Horizon Zero Dawn

Assassin’s Creed Origins

What Remains of Edith Finch

Gorogoa

Super Mario Odyssey

There’s a ton of stuff I didn’t finish, and there’s even more stuff that I never even got to.

4. Similarly, I don’t think I’m going to do a Music of 2017 post, but for wildly different reasons; I got turned on to a ton of amazing music this year, but I can’t necessarily say I listened to all that many new albums. My Favorites from the Spotify Discovery playlist is at least 150 songs deep, though.

5. And I didn’t watch nearly enough TV or film to even bother pretending to make lists for those things. I think I can safely say that Baby Driver was the most fun I’ve had in a movie theater in years, and the best shows I watched were Dark, Stranger Things 2, Legion and… hmm… I’m forgetting something, I know it. (I only made it 3 episodes into Twin Peaks.)

This is almost certainly my last post of 2017, and given that I’m restless, I may end up doing a redesign over the next few weeks or so. In any event, here’s hoping you had a lovely holiday, and I hope you have a much better 2018. Indeed, I hope we all do.

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As of today, 12/22/17, I’ve finished 50 books this year. I’m gonna be honest; a lot of what I read was a bit trashier than usual. I read a lot of escapist fiction, a lot of genre fiction, the sort of books that you’d buy at an airport before a long flight. I needed junk food, and I allowed myself to indulge, thoroughly.

And yet, you know what? When I look at the grades I handed out, I enjoyed pretty much everything. There were a few exceptions – one book I described as “one of the dumbest books I’ve read in a long, long time” – and there were a few books that I picked up and simply couldn’t get into, though I haven’t yet decided if I’m giving up on them for good or not.

In any event, because most of what I read was short, fast, and dirty, I’m not sure I have enough highlighted Kindle passages to do my “Favorite Sentences of 2017” post. It is what it is.

I suppose I should arrange this list in tiers. All lists are presented in the order in which I read them. You’ll notice some trilogies are staggered; for the most part, and this is weird, the second book usually dragged a bit but was necessary to get up the otherwise excellent finale. All italicized blurbs are directly from my GoogleDoc; I should probably admit up front that my memory is shit and next year I should write my blurbs in a bit more detail, because I barely recall reading some of these – especially some of the ones I loved.

A+

Dan Chaon, “Ill Will”

Amor Towles, “A Gentleman in Moscow”

Colson Whitehead, “The Underground Railroad”

John Hodgman, “Vacationland”

These are the four best books I read all year. “Ill Will” took me by complete surprise and had me riveted from cover to cover; “Gentleman in Moscow” was a complete delight; “Underground Railroad” should be required reading for literally everyone in the USA; and “Vacationland” is the best thing Hodgman’s ever written, which is saying quite a lot.

Neal Stephenson & Nicole Galland, “The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.” – very good. could be a good franchise starter, or not.

David Grann, “Killers of the Flower Moon” – heartbreaking. a story that needs to be told, even if the writing is a bit dry.

B+

Christopher Boucher, “Golden Delicious” – (started at end of Dec ’16) a wonderfully whimsical hybrid of Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America and The Phantom Tollbooth. Full disclosure – CB is a friend of my wife’s from high school. But I’d give this book high marks anyway.

Jeff VanderMeer, “Borne” – very interesting, didn’t quite live up to expectations but still engrossing

Ben Winters, “The Last Policeman #1” – a standard-issue detective story but with a magnificent premise, and very well written.

Ben Winters, “World of Trouble (Last Policeman #3)” – a very good finale to a very engrossing series.

Ann Leckie, “Ancillary Mercy (book 3)” – I didn’t write blurbs for each of the three books; this is an excellent trilogy and should be read in one go.

Paul La Farge, “The Night Ocean” – beautiful, haunted love story.

Michel Faber, “The Crimson Petal and the White” – very long, but very good; ending is very abrupt.

Ottessa Moshfegh, “Homesick for Another World” – what a dark, fucked up group of stories.

B

Federico Axat, “Kill the Next One” – pretty good, twisty pyschological thriller. every time i thought i knew where it was going, it swerved. the possum remains an enigma. (EDIT: I have no idea what I mean by that.)

Anthony Horowitz, “Moriarity” – that’s a pretty good twist at the end, i’ll give it that.

1. Here’s something positive – I’ve read a TON of really good books recently. The last time I wrote about books, I was in the middle of reading George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, which was great and I only wish I hadn’t rushed through the ending as quickly as I did. After that was John Darnielle’s Universal Harvester (very good, even if the initial premise ends up fading away towards the end), Sarah Pinborough’s Behind Her Eyes (which started off a bit blah, but ended up being great, and has one of the most jaw-dropping endings I can recall), Ursula le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (my first le Guin, and what a place to start!), Liz Moore’s The Unseen World (which was beautiful – although it, too, starts off in a direction that it very slowly veers away from), and then last night I finished Dan Chaon’s Ill Will, which was astonishing the whole way through. I realized that I’d bought his earlier novel Await Your Reply a while ago but never read it, and so I’m reading it right now. Instant fan.

2. All this reading has not yet turned itself into lyrics, but I’m getting there. Slowly but surely.

3. Game-wise, I’m still very much enjoying Horizon Zero Dawn although it’s a bit more difficult than I expected, and I’m currently trapped in a dungeon that I may not be able to get out of. At the very least, it’s keeping me thoroughly distracted from wanting Zelda. My rental copy of Nier: Automata arrived last night and I played the first hour, and it’s… pleasantly strange, though I don’t know if it’s where my head is at. I may just need to power through HZD until Mass Effect Andromeda lands.

4. Speaking of which, I already pre-ordered ME:A on Xbox One, and since I’m an EA Access member I think I get to play it a few days early, and if that’s the case, I’ll probably have to put HZD on the back-burner, which means I might not ever get back to it. HZD is the sort of game where you need the controls to feel fresh in your hands, and if I’m gonna spend 60 hours with ME:A, then HZD is going to be very difficult to get back to.

I just don’t have it in me, you guys. It was all I could do to recover from George Michael, and then it was Carrie Fisher. And these celebrity deaths, while temporarily distracting, still can’t thwart the nightmare that is the impending Trump presidency.

And yet: all things considered, 2016 wasn’t that terrible for me, personally speaking. Yes, I am a bit more in debt than I’d like to be, and I’ve put on a few pounds (the “Suburban 15”, as I’m calling them). But life in the ‘burbs is quite nice, and my kid loves it there, and my wife and I are as happy together as we’ve ever been. My office moved downtown which makes my commute a thousand times easier (even if it makes the rest of Manhattan a bit less accessible); and my day job itself is a thousand times less stressful (for a variety of reasons that I can’t get into in this space). If I have any regrets, it’s that I didn’t finish my album. At some point I will have to figure out how to get into a creative routine. But that’s for another post (or blog, possibly).

As per usual, I can’t crown a Best Film, because I hardly saw anything beyond the big blockbusters that lingered in theaters long after their opening weekends. I can say that Dr. Strange, while not my favorite Marvel movie, is certainly the most spectacular 3D experience I’ve ever had this side of Avatar, if only because 3D filmmakers have finally figured out that interior depth is more intriguing than random shit flying into your face. Rogue One is terrific enough to seriously upend my wife’s desired viewing order for our son, when he’s old enough to start watching Star Wars. Hell or High Water was great – and did quite a lot to show a side of America that us liberal elites in our cultural bubbles don’t often get to see. I have not yet seen Arrival (though I did read the short story it’s based on); nor have I seen Moonlight or La La Land or any of the other likely Best Picture nominees.

I listened to a ton of terrific music this year, and for that I have Spotify’s Discovery Playlist to thank. I have a lot of issues with internet-based algorithms, especially as the ones on social media tend to ignore the concept of linear time, but Spotify knows what I like and gives me a lot of it. I don’t know if I could properly order a Top 10 list of albums, but I know they’d include A Tribe Called Quest‘s “We Got It From Here…”, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard‘s “Nonagon Infinity”, Steve Gunn‘s “Eyes on the Lines”. I have custom playlists for my Favorite Songs of 2016, my Favorite Songs from The Discovery Playlist, and I also have Spotify’s curated Top 100 Songs which is a pleasing mix of both of the above, plus a few songs we listened to in the car that my son likes.

As for books: I did read quite a lot this year, though as said elsewhere in this blog I feel that the number of books doesn’t reflect their inherent quality; I read a lot of short genre fiction because I was feeling pressured to hit my Goodreads number, and so while I enjoyed a lot of what I read, I don’t know that I read good stuff. I’m not going to be doing a Favorite Sentences of 2016 post, in other words, because page-turners don’t often include beautiful turns of phrase. That said, I’m looking at my spreadsheet, and I gave high marks to a rather fair amount of stuff. The best of the best would include:

John Wray, The Lost Time Accidents

Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Daniel O’Malley, Stilleto

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between The World And Me

Paul Tremblay, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock

Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life

Nathan Hill, The Nix

Tana French, The Trespasser

J.M.R. Higgs, K.L.F.: Chaos Magic Music Money

N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate

Special credit to Drew Magary’s The Hike, which was an enjoyable enough read but whose last 2 pages provided one of the most stunning endings to a book I’ve ever read in my life.

And as for games: boy oh boy, I have no idea how to write about this year. I felt relatively unengaged with what I played throughout most of it – even as I finished a lot more games than usual – and then, probably brought on by a big of self-directed depression around my birthday in early December, I went on (and am still somewhat in the middle of) a gigantic spending spree primarily in an effort to boost my Xbox Achievement score past 100K. The difference in my gaming attitude before this spree and after cannot be overstated. I stopped keeping track of it in my spreadsheet, because it simply became too much to handle.

I don’t even know how to break this down, but here goes. I’m going to separate the games I finished from those I did not, and I’ll leave some room at the end for all the shit I accumulated in December that I simply haven’t had time to finish/start/digest.

GAMES LEFT UNFINISHED, in roughly chronological order:

The Witness (ps4) – I’m just not smart enough to get very far into it.

Klaus (ps4) – I bought this because of a Kotaku recommendation, I think, and never got past the 2nd or 3rd level.

Broforce (ps4) – picked this up as a PS+ freebie and couldn’t make it past the first level.

Far Cry Primal (ps4/xb1) – I’d rented this earlier in the year and found it intriguing but also wishing it was freed from having to be a “Far Cry” game; then it was on sale for Xbox for a stupidly-low price and I decided to give it another shot. It’s pretty good! Still working my way through it. I should also add that I also bought Far Cry 4 at the same time, also on Xbox, and I like that game a lot better the 2nd time around than I originally did.

Hitman (xb1) – I have played the first episode and liked what I played, but haven’t gone back to it at all since then. I should also note that I finished the first episode with a walkthrough, because that is the only way I can play Hitman games.

Unravel (xb1) – a very charming but also fiendishly difficult platformer that became frustrating. My kid loves watching it, though.

Ori Blind Forest DE (xb1) – I have every intention of finishing this at some point; I think I put it down right only because a bunch of stuff that will appear in the next category suddenly showed up.

Dirt Rally (ps4) – I love the Dirt games; it might very well be my 2nd favorite racing franchise behind Forza Horizon. But this one did absolutely nothing for me, and I’m not even sure I finished the very first race.

Dangerous Golf (xb1) – possibly the most disappointing game I played this year, if only because it’s made by ex-Burnout people and there was a lot of fun potential. The game simply feels like an unfinished and unpolished tech demo, with endless loading screens and finicky controls and cameras.

The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine – possibly my greatest regret of the year, that I haven’t finished this. I actually went out and bought the complete Witcher 3 on Xbox One (even though I already own it on PS4) just so that I could replay the entire game again and then approach this specific bit of DLC with a fully-levelled and customized Geralt.

Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst – I rented this on PS4 and found it dull and inspired; I downloaded it for free on XB1 and am willing to give it a few minutes here and there.

The Magic Circle – I’d heard interesting things about this when it came out for PC; the xbox port is kinda shitty and I lost interest.

Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens – this might very well be the last Lego game I attempt to play, sadly, at least until my kid is old enough to play without assistance. I’m getting very tired of how broken these games are, always in the same ways.

I am Sestuna (ps4) – I would’ve played this more, I bet, if there’d been a Vita port.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided – I made it almost to the end before realizing that I had to make a decision that I couldn’t have cared less about. I think I want to give it another shot, though.

The Turing Test – I made it pretty far into this one before hitting the proverbial wall, sadly. A pretty good puzzler, though, even if the narrative flails a bit.

Gears of War 4

Forza Horizon 3

Mafia 3

Battlefield 1

XCOM 2

Dragon Quest Builders

Dishonored 2

Watch Dogs 2

Final Fantasy XV

Steep

The Last Guardian

Stardew Valley

Dead Rising 4

That last bunch is all stuff that seemed to piled up all at the same time, most of which I’m still poking around with. (I did send Dead Rising 4 back, though, because I don’t give enough of a shit.) I’m not far enough into any of them to feel comfortable giving them a review, though I have every intention of giving all of them a fair shot.

I should note here that I still do not own a Playstation VR, and I’ve been checking every major retailer’s site at least once every few hours. I need it.

I should also note that I did rent but did not enjoy Overwatch, and I will also note that my lack of enjoyment is simply a matter of personal taste – I suck at team-based multiplayer shooters, and I have no desire to learn how to play them better, and it is what it is. I gather that it’s at the top of the lists for most other critics, and that’s fine.

GAMES THAT I DID ACTUALLY FINISH, also in roughly chronological order, including my informal scores from the spreadsheet:

Lego Marvel Avengers: C+

Firewatch:B+, and it’s only grown on me since I finished it

Superhot: B, and I would LOVE to play this again in VR

The Division:B, and I liked it a lot better than I expected to. Never got into the PvP stuff, but that’s par for the course around here.

Quantum Break: C, the perfect justification for having a Gamefly account. Spectacular to look at, and some of the time manipulation stuff is actually quite fun, but the overall experience was dreadfully shallow, the TV show half of the thing was super-dumb, and the final boss battle is one of the most frustrating I’ve played in years.

Ratchet and Clank: C-

Uncharted 4:A. I understand there’s something of a critical backlash about this game at the moment, but I think that’s kinda shitty; I had a blast with this game, and if this is indeed Naughty Dog’s last run with it, they left on a very high note.

Doom: A. I’ll confess that I finished this on easy mode, but that did not diminish my enjoyment of it one bit; I want to go back and play it on every difficulty, all the time. This one’s stuck with me much more than I expected it to.

Trials of the Blood Dragon: C+. I like the Trials games quite a lot, but the on-foot stuff was super dumb and broken and the whole thing felt rather uninspired.

INSIDE: A-/B+. I gave this high marks after I finished it, but as time goes on I find the ending more and more… dumb. That said, it’s still an engrossing experience, and one of the more engaging games I played all year.

Headlander: B. Loved this game, and I should get back to it and try to 100% it (I’m currently at 88%).

ABZU: ? I don’t know how to grade this. I was not as smitten with it as I’d thought I’d be, nor did I find it as gorgeous as other people did.

Valley: B-. There was an onslaught of intriguing indie games this summer, as you can see, and this one had some positive word-of-mouth. It was… OK.

Picross 3D Round 2: A+, and one of the best puzzle games I’ve ever played. Has to be in my top 3 for the year; I couldn’t put my 3DS down for the entire time I was playing it.

Virginia: ? I suspect I’ll need to replay this again and see if anything changes.

Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare: B. The grade is just for the campaign, of course, because that’s all I care about, and I’ll be goddamned if this isn’t one of the most fun Call of Duty games I’ve played since, well, Modern Warfare. Had a blast with this, although it’s overshadowed by…

Titanfall 2: B+, and this would be the shooter of the year if not for Doom. Hell, I might have to replay them both and see if this one gets the nod.

NOTABLE iOS GAMES:

Swapperoo

Train Conductor World

Solitarica

Reigns

Mini Metro

Human Resources Manager

Loop Mania

Sky Force Reloaded

Microsoft Solitaire (yes, really)

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[EDIT: I realize that, as I’d guessed in the first paragraph, I’d forgotten to talk about a bunch of things; those work-related interruptions did indeed screw up my train of thought. Additional thoughts will be added below.]

I’m having one of those days where I’m not particularly busy, but I can guarantee that as soon as I start getting on a roll here, I’ll be given some work to do. I’ve been wanting to write here all week, frankly, and the whole week has been in this same sort of vein; I’m terribly idle right up until the moment I decide to be personally productive, and then I’ll get handed a large project within the next 1-5 minutes of that decision. If I’m stalling here in this introductory paragraph, it’s because I’m reluctant to suddenly lose my actual blog-worthy trains of thought.

As it happens from time to time, I’m starting to have trouble articulating this blog’s primary purpose. I like having a blog, and I don’t plan on deleting this one; it’s just that I simply don’t have the time/inclination to do any serious criticism here. I’ve noticed lately that to the extent I write anything even remotely critical at all, it’s mostly just “I like this, I don’t like that.” Superficial, not particularly hard-hitting, shallow. Again, it’s difficult for me to find time to write the way I’d like to, and I’m currently in this phase where I’m having trouble really getting into things the way I used to, which has a tendency to result in apathy. I’m not sure if this is a side effect of my new head meds or not; one positive side effect of these head meds is that my ability to simply let things be what they are is a lot stronger.

Westworld: I’ve started to notice (on Twitter, at least) that there are regular watchers of this show who are becoming angry and impatient at the show’s very slow doling out of information. There are too many mysteries and not enough answers, they say, even though we’re only halfway through the first season. There is now a struggle between the pleasure of anticipation and the need for instant gratification, and I can’t help but wonder if Netflix and the culture of binge-watching has ruined the ability for a television show’s cliffhanger to be effective. Westworld reminds me a lot of Lost, in this way, but Lost suffered from a different problem; Lost’s mysteries overwhelmed the show itself to the point where there were no answers that could ever possibly be adequate. I remain very optimistic that Westworld will not suffer this fate; each episode has been meticulous in its construction and I remain confident that the showrunners know exactly what they’re doing. (The show’s only made one real blunder, as far as I’m concerned – the dopey and crude lab techs from this last week’s episode are gross and annoying, and their scenes aren’t nearly as well-written as everyone else’s.) In any event, I’m just grateful to watch Anthony Hopkins kill it on a weekly basis.

Cubs: I am no longer the die-hard sports fanatic that I used to be; among other things, I found my intense superstitious behaviors to be an impediment to the simple enjoyment of watching a game (i.e., if my team needed to score a run / goal / touchdown, I’d have to leave the room and pee; I could only listen to the Yankees on the radio, even when the radio broadcasting became abhorrent to listen to, etc.). Also my wife and I cut the cable cord a few years ago and live sports, for the most part, became something I simply couldn’t watch, which made this transition into the non-sports-caring person I am today that much easier. In any event, I’m still terribly superstitious, as it turns out, and so even though I was rooting for the Cubs, I was terribly afraid of saying or doing anything that might jinx them. The most I could allow myself to do was to “Like” the various Cubs-related Facebook posts that my family and friends posted, and that was it. I know it’s ridiculous, and this is why I’ve forcibly stopped myself from caring so much. [EDIT: So, anyway, GO CUBS! Very happy for all my Cub friends and family. I, of course, didn’t watch. You’re welcome.]

Games: It’s big-budget first-person-shooter season, and as such I’ve decided to give in and rent the big three. I’m still in the first mission of Battlefield 1, and while it’s technically very impressive I’m not, like, craving it. My rental copy of the new Call of Duty is en route, as is Titanfall 2; I ordinarily would be happy to ignore both of these games except that their single-player campaigns have been getting surprisingly great reviews, and that’s the only bit of those games that I tend to get involved with. So be it. [EDIT: I also ended up giving up on XCOM 2; I can tell it’s a good game, but I also know I’m far too intimidated by it to give it its proper due. I may pick it up again during a release lull, but I wouldn’t expect myself to get much farther than I already did.]

Books: Man, it’s been a while since I’ve talked about books here. The last thing I mentioned was The Nix, which I adored. Since then, I’ve read:

KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money

J.M.R. Higgs

A-

The Tresspasser

Tana French

A

Death’s End

Liu Cixin

B+

Pym

Mat Johnson

B-

His Bloody Project

Graeme MaCrae Burnet

B

I am now currently reading I.Q. by Joe Ide, and even though I’m in the early going I’m enjoying it quite a lot.

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1. First thing’s fuckin’ last: my first piece in Videodame’s Co-op Campaign is up, in which me and my buddy Sara start our discussion about Uncharted 4. I’d deliberately avoided talking about U4 in these pages because I knew this thing was going to start up, sogo on and give it a spin, why don’t you?

2. I’m in a weird place, gaming-wise. I’m not playing anything with any enthusiasm. Work has been killing me and my three-year-old is a vortex of I’m exhausted, for one thing, and so if I do end up playing anything it’s not for very long; I’m inching along in Witcher 3: Blood and Wine for this very reason. (Also, I appear to be wildly under-levelled for some of the sidequests, and so I’m kinda just treading water.) I gave up on Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, because it was hopelessly dumb; one particular side quest has a broken Runner’s Vision thing which kept sending me off a ledge too high for me to survive, and it’s not like I particularly cared about what I was doing. I’ve more or less given up on Trials of the Blood Dragon, because the off-bike stuff is soooooo bad. My rental copy of Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens should be arriving next week, but if the demo is any indication, it’s still the same old broken platforming bullshit that’s been plaguing this series for years.

I honestly can’t remember what else is on my plate at the moment. I beat the new Gauntlet mode in Swapperoo, my current iOS GOTY candidate; woo-hoo.

3. I’ve read a hell of a lot of books lately, though. Of note:

I finished Justin Cronin’s “City of Mirrors”. Among the few friends of mine who’ve also read it, I probably have the highest opinion of it; I think, if nothing else, that it ends quite well.

Victor LaVelle’s “The Ballad of Black Tom” is a very short Lovecraftian novella that inverts Lovecraft’s latent racist attitudes into something much more powerful.

Joe Hill’s “The Fireman” is a really interesting premise and an absorbing read, though I wouldn’t call it a horror novel.

Daniel O’Malley’s “Stiletto” is the 2nd installment of his Rook series, and it’s arguably more entertaining than the first entry; the premise is essentially if the X-Men were running the British Secret Service and defending the country from other supernatural forces. Very witty, very clever, and this 2nd book is very exciting indeed.

Sylvain Neuvel’s “Sleeping Giants” had been popping up in my periphery for a while, and I started it last night on the train and finished it this morning. If this is the beginning of a new franchise (there is at least one more book coming next year), consider me signed on.

And now I just started Emma Straub’s “Modern Lovers”, which is very much NOT action/sci-fi.

…My scramble for self-identity was tied up in records, and Other Music was where I went to get myself sorted out. What did I like? What did I want? Which section did I want to start flipping through first, and what did that say about me? The classification of a person via her cultural preferences and proclivities—maybe that’s something we should be glad to wave goodbye to. One is no longer either a punk or a goth, In or Out; one merely is.

But it’s also why I think of Other Music as an integral player in my making, and why witnessing its end feels especially personal. We all experience some version of this dissociation a million times in a life: a drawbridge being raised behind you. The sense that you couldn’t re-create yourself now if you tried. When I needed it to, Other Music turned the whole notion of “Other” into something prideful—it forced me to make a choice about who I thought I was, or could be—and for that I’ll always be grateful, beholden.

And just like that, the day job is busy again. Until next time! [Exits, pursued by a bear]

Between Bowie and Rickman alone, I’m just shredded to bits. I have work to do, and I can’t focus. I have emails to respond to, and I don’t know what to say. I’m writing this post if only so that I can remember how to put words together.

I have completed my chronological journey through David Mitchell’s work, tidying up my second read of “Bone Clocks” during this morning’s commute. Even though I’m a little sad that this “project” is over, and that there’s nothing of his imminently appearing on the horizon (even if there are a ton of things coming out eventually), I’m glad that I took the opportunity to read it all. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that he’s become my new favorite author. I haven’t felt so overwhelmingly book-nerdy since finishing “Infinite Jest” back in college. Certainly my 2nd reading of “Cloud Atlas” was much more enjoyable than the first, if only because I now have a much better sense of the grander scale that Mitchell is working in. And seeing familiar characters pop up in different contexts is always neat, and yet it never felt particularly gimmicky; given that all these books are connected, it really just makes them feel somehow truer. For example: you already get a really thorough sense of Hugo Lamb when you read his chapter in Bone Clocks, but when you read Black Swan Green, you see him as a teenager through the worshipful eyes of his cousin, and suddenly you have a greater sense of how deep Hugo’s charm is (as well as a brief glimpse of his cunning manipulations). Similarly, it’s only once you read everything that you see how deep a character like Marinus actually is; it’s one thing to hear him recount his history in Bone Clocks, but it’s quite another to actually be with him in the 1800s in “Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet”. And it’s also interesting to see how larger-scale events correspond throughout his work – one can suddenly see that the futuristic, very troubled Earth presented in the two late sections of Cloud Atlas are part of the same cataclysm that takes place in the coda of Bone Clocks.

Speaking of which – against the recommendations of all my Facebook friends who are also hard-core Mitchell nerds, the wife and I ended up watching the filmed version of “Cloud Atlas“. Although, if I’m being honest, we only made it through the first hour or so, before we both started fading out. I have seen enough of it to know that I probably don’t have to finish it, and my wife (who hasn’t read the book) had little to no idea what the hell was going on, and so I don’t think she’s inclined to finish it either. That being said, I don’t outright hate it, though there’s plenty of things to be intensely disappointed by. Yes, the chopping up of the book’s structure is terrible – though I suppose I can understand why the filmmakers felt that they had to do it, given that the book is not necessarily jam-packed with excitement and that fitting this entire book into a 3-hour package is going to mean you need to amp up the pacing a bit. I suppose I can even get behind the idea of having actors playing multiple roles, although that’s not really what the book is about, and it also means that Tom Hanks is horrendously miscast in nearly every role he steps into. (To be fair to Tom Hanks, though, I’m also dangerously close to overdosing on him, because my son is obsessed with “The Polar Express“, another film in which Tom Hanks plays multiple roles; I think I’ve seen Polar Express at least 30 times since Christmas.) And to the film’s credit, I am somewhat astonished at how closely some of the film’s visuals matched my own imagined set design – the Frobisher segment in particular is nearly note for note. Indeed, for all the film’s flaws, you can’t say that the filmmakers weren’t passionate about the project; this is clearly a labor of love.

The problem, really, is that the book’s most visceral appeal (for me, at least) is in its use of language, and in seeing how language evolves in each of the story’s eras, and in the futuristic sections of the film the viewer is never really given an opportunity to let the language’s evolution sink in. This is most notable in the post-apocalyptic future, which is damn near unintelligible without subtitles. If I were scoring this using Nathan Rabin’s “World Of Flops” system, I might feel generous enough to give it a “Fiasco”… but I haven’t finished the film, and it’s probably best if I don’t. But in reading Rabin’s WoF column about the Wachowski’s “Jupiter Ascending“, this paragraph seems pretty close to capturing what’s up with Cloud Atlas:

…the Wachowskis are auteurs whose failures are as audacious, ambitious, heroically sincere, and achingly romantic as their extraordinary early successes.

As far as filmed adaptations of David Mitchell go, though, I would very highly recommend checking out the 13-minute short film “The Voorman Problem“, which is an adapted excerpt from Mitchell’s second novel, “number9dream” (and which is also later referenced in “Bone Clocks”, as a matter of fact). It’s very short, excellently cast, exceedingly faithful to the source material, and feels very much like some sort of Twilight Zone nightmare.

I was home with my son on Tuesday – he had a bit of a fever – and during his nap I downloaded and started playing Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India. I’m playing it on XB1 instead of PS4, if only because, for whatever reason, it was available for download on XB1 several hours before it was on PS4, and I needed something to do. (I suppose I also bought it there because I needed to further justify my purchase of the XB1’s Elite Controller, which is, without a doubt, the greatest game controller ever made.) I like these sorts of 2.5D stealth platformers, and I just wish I wasn’t so goddamned terrible at this particular one; I can’t tell if the game is really difficult, or if I’m just very bad at it. It could be both, frankly, for all I know. It’s certainly very pretty to look at. If nothing else, it makes me very hungry for Mark of the Ninja 2, which I very much hope is a thing that exists.

I’m not really playing anything else, though, which I’m strangely OK with. Like I said at the top of this post – I’ve been very much a book nerd for the last few weeks/months, and I haven’t felt so excited about reading in years, and it’s a really pleasant feeling to have.

I’m hell-bent on getting some lyric-writing done, because once I have lyrics I’ll be able to finish this album, and I need to get it out the door while I still like the music. Have I talked about my struggles with writing lyrics here? I might have, which is why I’m reluctant to repeat myself. In any event, the album was conceived under some heavy-duty emotional stress, and even as I’ve managed to extricate myself from within all that baggage, I still have to look at it in order to write about it. And it’s hard to write about parts of your past when you’re not particularly proud of yourself. I feel like I need to apologize to everyone I know, which is difficult when the two people I most need to apologize to won’t respond. (This is actually true; last year I sent out some emails which were quite difficult to write, and never ended up hearing back.) That said, it’s still gotta get done, and so I’m pleading with whoever’s in charge of this stuff to PLEASE STOP WITH THE DEATHS OF IMPORTANT PEOPLE. This is hard enough as it is.